There's still time left to take advantage of shrimp run

Here it is, the third week of October and the rut is nearing it's second peak, the mullet are fast filling with roe and the flounder, trout and reds are piling up around the inlets.

I mean it's fall.

Yet over here on our river, what is generally considered a summer activity is still on many folks minds -- shrimping.

If you haven't heard about the shrimp run, you must not have been paying attention to the waters around here for the past few months. This year's shrimp run has been of historic proportions.

Our first clue that it could be a great year came in late spring when the flounder giggers commented on the unusual number of shrimp they were seeing in their lights.

Another early clue came from the commercial crabbers as they reported hulls (the shed shells of growing shrimp) in their traps down south of Green Cove Springs in May. Then in June we had verification of what those clues meant. By the end of the month, reports from all over the river started to come in.

Those reports, especially by mid-July, were spectacular. Of course, it was not that the shrimp were big yet, even though many were worth eating, but rather that the numbers were off the charts.

It was not at all unusual to hear fishermen say "I was catching way over a hundred a toss."

They weren't lying.

Here at the house, a place where in more than 20 years we've seldom caught more that number in an evening, the numbers were staggering. Even when we tossed back nearly half of each net full because we deemed them to small, filling a bucket took no time at all.

This unusually robust shrimp run has been helped along by the fact that we've had a very dry year, one with no tropical event that would flush the shrimp from the river. The result so far is that it's been one for the record books.

And I say "so far" because there are still plenty of shrimp to be had, and they are getting big.

On Monday night, my wife, Louann, and I put out three small baits just to see if the shrimp had moved off. It's been more than a week since anyone tried it off the dock and we were curious.

We didn't let the baits sit long. In fact, it was not even good and dark before we had our answer and walked back up the dock to the house.

Casting a handful of times on those baits made it quite obvious that tossing a net is still well worth the trouble.

This meshes well with what one of the crabbers recounted from the area around the Shands Bridge over the weekend, basically saying that the shrimp were still plentiful and big.

Now, I will tell you that "red legs" (shrimp on the move towards the ocean) made up a larger portion of what we saw on the dock, something to be expected this time of year.

What I'll also say is that there were plenty of smaller shrimp in the net. Given time, they will continue to grow.

The point of all this is that you've still got time to take advantage of the shrimp run, assuming the deer and the flounder and the trout haven't gotten all your attention.